Why security's no longer IT's ugly stepsister

Friday, 20 February 2004, 2:26 AM EST

First, it was Cisco's Super Bowl ad, in which a chief financial officer's daughter downloads a game that infects an entire network. Two weeks later--this time for real--Juniper acquired NetScreen Technologies for upward of $3 billion. These are the most visible examples, but if you listen to the strategies of other networking vendors like 3Com, Enterasys Networks, Extreme Networks or Nortel Networks, you can see the formation of a definite trend: Networking and security are moving closer together.

While networking and security have been kissing cousins for years, a marriage looks more and more imminent. Why? First of all, both technologies monitor bits as they flow through the network. Networking equipment watches traffic to make routing, switching and quality-of-service decisions. Security devices eyeball the same traffic in search of protocol anomalies, known attack patterns, viruses and worms.

Spotlight

Microsoft Edge, the new browser in Windows 10, represents a significant increase in the security over Internet Explorer. However, there are also new potential threat vectors that arenít present in older versions.

35 percent of employees would sell information on company patents, financial records and customer credit card details if the price was right. This illustrates the growing importance for organizations to deploy data loss prevention strategies.

Sun Tzu's writings have been studied throughout the ages by professional militaries and can used to not only answer the question of whether or not we are in a cyberwar, but how one can fight a cyber-battle.

Infosec consultant Paul Moore came up with a working solution to thwart a type of behavioral profiling. The result is a Chrome extension called Keyboard Privacy, which prevents profiling of users by the way they type by randomizing the rate at which characters reach the DOM.